Vampirism Gone Viral: Medical Misinformation and Vaccine Hesitancy (Online)

Vampires are carriers for the contemporary anxieties of the cultures that created them. The modern vampire originates in the 1980s, a decade defined in no small part by HIV/AIDS, when society was preoccupied with blood as the medium of monstrosity, and misunderstanding spread like a virus. One cannot demand medical accuracy from narratives predicated on blood-drinking undead aristocrats, but one might expect more from actual humans; however, when threatened, the many people abandon scientific evidence in favor of panicked fear-mongering even in relation to, for example, vaccines for preventable childhood illness.

This lecture will consider how post-AIDS crisis vampires in film and television, from the time of BLADE (1998) to the cusp of COVID-19, have reflected our fears of infection, contagion, and containment. Examples will include the television series American Horror Story: Hotel and The Strain, the 2006 TV movie version of DRACULA, and the films BLADE, THIRST, and I AM LEGEND. These narratives utilize a layperson’s scientific awareness to identify vampirism as a disease—a natural condition that doctors, pathologists, geneticists, and the occasional hematologist mutter about in their laboratories as the virus (or gene, or bacteria, or some combination thereof) behaves in ways that no virus ever has. These fantastic contagions are analogous to the real-world monsters of weaponized misinformation, scientific denialism, and vaccine hesitancy.